Errr…he’s a right wing hack:
Robert L. Johnson came to the Bush administration’s attention when it needed him most. The cause of the White House’s duress was an annoyingly munificent collection of millionaires, headed by Bill Gates Sr., who had banded together to oppose President Bush’s plan to abolish the estate tax. In newspaper ads and press conferences, they held forth on the obligation of the wealthy to give back to society. So effectively did they seize the moral high ground that even the most fervent opponents of the estate tax resigned themselves to it. “$(I$)t is looking increasingly doubtful,” reported The Wall Street Journal a week later, “that large estates will escape federal taxation altogether.”
Evidently this didn’t sit well with Johnson, the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), whose family stood to gain millions if Bush succeeded. Johnson is not a man with a deep sense of social obligation. Not long ago, when an interviewer prodded him for his views on philanthropy, Johnson scoffed, “$(B$)eing a very wealthy person is not something that I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Gee, I got all this money. How do I give it away?'” There is, however, an important exception to this every-man-for-himself ethos: society’s duty to aid extremely wealthy African Americans. This social obligation Johnson takes very seriously.
So Johnson did what he often does when his interests are at stake: He played the race card. Johnson gathered a collection of black business leaders and demanded an end to the estate tax. Taking out newspaper ads of their own, Johnson’s group attacked the tax for draining wealth from the black community. Unlike “very wealthy white Americans” who supported the tax, he declared, “We as African Americans have come to our wealth on a different path, a different road than they have.” Gates and his friends, Johnson implied, were not really promoting the common good; they were trying to keep the black man down. All of a sudden, it was not so clear who held the moral high ground. Estate tax repeal had become a civil rights issue.
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Fortunately for Johnson, and even more fortunately for his heirs, estate tax repeal subsequently passed into law. But Johnson’s campaign to abolish the estate tax was more than just a way to save a few million bucks. It was the beginning of a political partnership between the CEO of BET and the president of the United States, one that has now turned its attention to an even grander cause: the privatization of Social Security. On May 2, Bush appointed Johnson to his commission charged with transforming the popular program. Once again, Johnson has racialized a long-standing conservative crusade. We must turn Social Security into a system with individual investment accounts, he argues, because the existing program unfairly shortchanges blacks. Social Security overhaul is Bush’s most radical–and most politically perilous–aspiration. That the administration has entrusted Johnson with this task, despite his lack of expertise (and, indeed, his lack of any history of public interest in the issue), is a measure of the ideological reliability with which it now regards him. Johnson, according to one analyst, “is trying to position himself as Bush’s go-to guy in the African American community.” And it looks like he’s succeeding.
One issue that continues to baffle me is that while Obama uses poor language to say Social Security is in crisis-it’s not, it has issues at best, he has a clear plan that is quite progressive to deal with it–a plan that solves the problem beyond any reasonable estimation from the actuaries.
However, Clinton wants to turn over the decision to a pane of villagers in DC–people who think there is a crisis and wanted to buy into Bush’s privatization scheme. There’s a clearly better answer here–and one more transparent and Hillary Clinton doesn’t have it.